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body against you; not a friend, nowhere, nowhere a-tall; I'd—I'd rather be d-e-a-d!"

Her voice quivered in a terrible intensity on the word "dead," and she broke into a stifled sobbing, trying to hold her lips steady and blinking the tears from her eyes.

"What I couldn't understan'," said Mrs. Roxie in a cold voice, "was how you could act that way after all Brother Perry had done for you."

"Oh, I know it, Miss Roxie!" responded the girl miserably. "All of you, ever' person in Irontown has been so good to me. Oh—oh, I can't tell why! I—I!"—the old woman could see her colour painfully in the uncertain light—"God knows," she wailed, "I would do anything in the world—anything, if I could be a pure girl again!" She extended her hands impulsively; then as the good old woman withdrew slightly, she pressed her clenched fists against her breast and stood looking at Mrs. Roxie with a tortured face.

Strangely enough the girl's wretched confession created a stronger repulsion in Mrs. Biggers; it brought the girl's undoing before her, visualized it. She wanted the creature to go away; to take herself off. Nessie seemed something unclean on her porch.

"Of course, there ain't no way to undo that," said Mrs. Biggers, controlling her distaste. "You ort to have thought of all this, Nessie, before you sinned."

The girl came to a pause in her weeping at this splendid but unfortunately retroactive advice.

"Ye-es," she agreed in a melancholy whisper.

Mrs. Biggers continued looking coldly and speculatively at her. The old woman really had a bit of very helpful advice which she might give if she were so minded; that was for Nessie to get out of town at once and escape the mob—but was she so minded? She did not know. She had a feeling that the obscenity and humiliation of mob violence were a part of the girl's just punishment. It would "learn her," she thought. She might even be interfering with God's vengeance. A Biblical text floated across her mind,